30 Pieces of Silver Paid in Full, Wirch Gets Spot on JFC

It’s that incom­ing minor­ity leader Chris Lar­son (D-Milwaukee) bounced off Lena Tay­lor (D-Milwaukee) to put Wirch on and decided to keep La Crosse’s Jen Shilling — who was a main­stay dur­ing her Assem­bly days — on instead.

A Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tor said to have changed his vote for his party’s leader snagged a cov­eted appoint­ment Wednes­day on the Legislature’s pow­er­ful bud­get committee.

After the vote, Erpenbach’s back­ers con­cluded Sen. Bob Wirch (D-Pleasant Prairie) had voted for Lar­son after say­ing he would vote for Erpen­bach. One of them had noticed Wirch had folded his bal­lot mul­ti­ple times and was able to tell which bal­lot was cast by Wirch after the fact.

Justin Sar­gent, Larson’s chief of staff, said that the Mil­wau­kee Demo­c­rat hadn’t con­sid­ered the recent lead­er­ship vote in decid­ing on the com­mit­tee appoint­ments. Shilling, who had run for assis­tant minor­ity leader and lost to Sen. Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay), was seen as being aligned with Erpenbach.

Under the soon-to-be replaced leg­is­la­ture, Tay­lor is the cur­rent co-chair of Joint Finance with soon-to-be Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington). What exactly did she do to Lar­son to not only lose her senior­ity from the com­mit­tee, but to be bounced completely.

There’s got to be a story behind that right there. Is it because the two don’t get along — a the­ory I don’t buy — or because the two faced off against each other in the pri­maries of Mil­wau­kee Assem­bly Dis­tricts where Lar­son (and WEAC) was seek­ing to replace many African Amer­i­can incum­bents who Tay­lor was close with?

It’s prob­a­bly the lat­ter, but the truth is, we’ll never know. He’s only has two spots to fill, and prob­a­bly has a litany of rea­sons not to give each and every mem­ber of his cau­cus a spot on Joint Finance.